Martin Čertner

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at Charles University in Prague

The ecological and evolutionary consequences of ploidy-driven trait variation, particularly for autopolyploids, remain poorly understood. Saxifraga oppositifolia L. (purple saxifrage) is a highly successful arctic-alpine plant species with significant genetic and phenotypic variation potentially related to autopolyploidy. Over the past decade, we h...

Flowering plants show significant diversity in sexual strategies, profoundly impacting the evolution of sexual traits and associated genes. Sexual selection is one of the primary evolutionary forces driving sexual trait variation, particularly evident during pollen-pistil interactions, where pollen grains compete for fertilization and females selec...

Serpentine soils exhibit extreme properties (e.g. high magnesium content) influencing plant growth and survival, and have been repeatedly documented to promote adaptive edaphic differentiation in plants. Individuals from four pairs of nearby diploid and autotetraploid populations of Biscutella laevigata sampled on serpentine versus non‐serpentine s...

Flow cytometry has emerged as a uniquely flexible, accurate, and widely applicable technology for the analysis of plant cells. One of its most important applications centers on the measurement of nuclear DNA contents. This chapter describes the essential features of this measurement, outlining the overall methods and strategies, but going on to pro...

In theory, any plant tissue providing intact nuclei in sufficient quantity is suitable for nuclear DNA content estimation using flow cytometry (FCM). While this certainly opens a wide variety of possible applications of FCM, especially when compared to classical karyological techniques restricted to tissues with active cell division, tissue selecti...

Parallel evolution is common in nature and provides one of the most compelling examples of rapid environmental adaptation. In contrast to the recent burst of studies addressing genomic basis of parallel evolution, integrative studies linking genomic and phenotypic parallelism are scarce. Edaphic islands of toxic serpentine soils provide ideal syste...

Across eukaryotic organisms there is a great diversity of life cycles. This particularly applies to unicellular eukaryotes (protists), where the life cycles are still largely unexplored, although this knowledge is key to understanding their biology. To detect the often inconspicuous transitions among life cycle stages, we focused at shifts in ploid...

Parallel evolution is common in nature and provides one of the most compelling examples of rapid environmental adaptation. In contrast to the recent burst of studies addressing genomic basis of parallel evolution, integrative studies linking genomic and phenotypic parallelism are scarce. Edaphic islands of toxic serpentine soils provide ideal syste...

Polyploidisation is an important evolutionary force in land plants. Due to its recurrent incidence, many plant species retain individuals of two or more different ploidy levels. However, particular ecological and evolutionary mechanisms facilitating intraspecific cytotype coexistence have been identified for just a handful of species and cannot yet...

Although the evolutionary drivers of genome size change are known, the general patterns and mechanisms of plant genome size evolution are yet to be established. Here we aim to assess the relative importance of proliferation of repetitive DNA, chromosomal variation (incl. polyploidy) and the type of endoreplication for genome size evolution of the P...

Hybrid seed inviability (HSI) is an important mechanism of reproductive isolation and speciation. HSI varies in strength among populations of diploid species but it remains to be tested whether similar processes affect natural variation in HSI within ploidy‐variable species (triploid block). Here we used extensive endosperm, seed and F1‐hybrid phen...

Pollen grains are the male gametophytes in a seed‐plant life cycle. Their small, particulate nature and crucial role in the plant reproduction have made them an attractive object of study using flow cytometry (FCM), with a wide range of applications existing in the literature. While methodological considerations for many of these overlap with those...

This article comments on: Mariana Castro1, João Loureiro, Brian C. Husband and Sílvia Castro, The role of multiple reproductive barriers: strong post-pollination interactions govern cytotype isolation in a tetraploid–octoploid contact zone, Annals of Botany, Volume 126, Issue 6, 2 November 2020, Pages 991–1003, https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcaa084

PREMISE: Whole genome duplication is a major evolutionary event, but its role in ecological divergence remains equivocal. When populations of different ploidy (cytotypes) overlap in space, “contact zones” are formed, allowing the study of evolutionary mechanisms contributing toward ploidy divergence. Multiple contact zones per species’ range are of...

Polyploidy is a significant driver of plant diversity and is, along with homoploid hybridisation, widely accepted as a common and important evolutionary force in plants. Here, we employed Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP) fingerprinting, ploidy level and genome size determination via flow cytometry and morphometry in order to disentangl...

In angiosperms, genome size and nucleobase composition (GC content) exhibit pronounced variation with possible adaptive consequences. The hyperdiverse orchid family possessing the unique phenomenon of partial endoreplication (PE) provides a great opportunity to search for interactions of both genomic traits with the evolutionary history of the fami...

Aim While environmental conditions are reported as important determinants of cytotype distribution patterns in some mixed‐ploidy plant species, in others they seem to play no role. One reason for such inconsistency might be how and at what spatial scale the ecology of different cytotypes is compared. To address this issue, we adopted several comple...

Background and Aims: Polyploidy has played an important role in the evolution of ferns. However, the dearth of data on cytotype diversity, cytotype distribution patterns and ecology in ferns is striking in comparison with angiosperms and prevents an assessment of whether cytotype coexistence and its mechanisms show similar patterns in both plant gr...

Whole genome duplication is a key process in plant evolution and has direct phenotypic consequences. However, it remains unclear whether ploidy‐related phenotypic changes can significantly alter the fitness of polyploids in nature and thus contribute to establishment of new polyploid mutants in diploid populations. We addressed this question using...

Mixed-ploidy species harbor a unique form of genomic and phenotypic variation that influences ecological interactions, facilitates genetic divergence, and offers insights into the mechanisms of polyploid evolution. However, there have been few attempts to synthesize this literature. We review here research on the cytotype distribution, diversity, a...

Background and aims: Despite the recent wealth of studies targeted at contact zones of cytotypes in various species, some aspects of polyploid evolution are still poorly understood. This is especially the case for the frequency and success rate of spontaneous neopolyploidization or the temporal dynamics of ploidy coexistence, requiring massive plo...

Interspecific hybridization, especially when regularly followed by backcrossing (i.e., introgressive hybridization), conveys a substantial risk for many endangered organisms. This is particularly true for narrow endemics occurring within distributional ranges of widespread congeners. An excellent example is provided by the plant genus Knautia (Capr...

• Premise of the study: Contact zones between polyploids and their diploid progenitors may provide important insights into the mechanisms of sympatric speciation and local adaptation. However, most published studies investigated secondary contact zones where the effects of genome duplication can be confounded by previous independent evolution of cu...